5 ms·

> Some places never locked down, like Sweden After the first two devastating waves during the Spring and Autumn of 2020, Sweden in fact 'locked-down' in some w

> Some places never locked down, like Sweden After the first two devastating waves during the Spring and Autumn of 2020, Sweden in fact 'locked-down' in some ways more restrictively than our nordic neighbors - all of which made timely interventions that meant their restrictions on meeting en-masse in public were for shorter periods and less intrusive on people's everyday lives. The narrative that it was a 'free-for-all' in Sweden has been fostered retrospectively by neo-liberal groups that placed economics above human lives. In their eagerness to be 'proved right' after the fact, most Swedes now embrace this historical revisionism. The statistics that show that Swedish "excess deaths" were low or even lower than other countries were cooked-up by a journalist from a right-wing newspaper in Sweden (SvD), who noticed that if one discounts the downward trend in excess death for the last 25 years in Sweden, together with dispensing with demographic weighting, and then averaging the 3 years from 2019 onwards (which includes the period after vaccination), then miraculously you can squeeze the numbers you want from the raw figures.

nvm0n2 3y ago
> the first two devastating waves during the Spring and Autumn of 2020 Sweden had negative excess mortality from Jan 2020 to Spring 2021, so fewer people died than expected in this period. These COVID waves just weren't devastating in any way, and yielded virtually no deaths "of" and not "with" COVID. It's strange that you are so convinced that Sweden's data doesn't disprove the effectiveness of lockdowns... > neo-liberal groups that placed economics above human lives Ah, I see.
- sampo 3y ago
  > Sweden had negative excess mortality from Jan 2020 to Spring 2021 According to this, Sweden had quite bad excess mortality in 2020 in April and May, and some in June. And then again from mid-November 2020 to mid-January 2021. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-raw-death-count?country=~SWE https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-raw-deat... There are many different ways different sources have tried to estimate cumulative excess mortality. Depending on the calculation methods, different sources have ended up with quite different results. What is your source, and what method did they use?
  - nvm0n2 3y ago
    2015-2019 average baseline. It can be debated what model should be used and governments don't always have consistent methods of baselining. With different models you can compute some excess mortality in Sweden but those have their own flaws. But it's worth calling out here that the reason you have to dive into the details of what precise baseline model you use is because the number of deaths was so very tiny on the scale of a country. A simple graph showing the absolute numbers puts it in perspective: https://www.statista.com/statistics/525353/sweden-number-of-deaths/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/525353/sweden-number-of-... Alternatively, a graph of deaths per 100k people shows how surprisingly normal 2020 was in Sweden: https://i0.wp.com/swprs.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/sweden-mortality-stepwise-zorinaq.png?ssl=1 https://i0.wp.com/swprs.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/swede... It looks initially dramatic but that's only due to the massive drop in 2019. In reality 2020 had the same number of deaths per pop as in 2015! Nothing special happened in 2015. Given that 2019 was an abnormally low year, 2020 would have been a bit higher than normal anyway even with no pandemic. But we're still looking at numbers pretty much within the realm of normal variance. If somehow you'd never heard of COVID, then someone had shown you that graph and asked "did something catastrophic happen in this decade" you'd probably have said no. Although 2020 is a bit higher, it's on the order of a few thousands of people, not something you could have noticed in a country of millions short of saturation-level media coverage. That's why it's hard to say but important to hear: these levels of death simply do not matter. How do we know? Because some countries have had high and persistent levels of excess death since the end of the pandemic, but as COVID isn't the explanation hardly anyone cares. There's just no link between levels of death and severity of reaction, in our society.
    - sampo 3y ago
      > 2015-2019 average baseline. Many European countries have an ageing population, and thus the number of yearly deaths increase year to year. For example Finland in 2010–2019 had about 0.8% increase in yearly deaths every year. If the deaths followed this model and thus there was absolutely no excess mortality (and no random variation), the simple method you cite would compare 2020, 2021 and 2022 to the average of 2015–2019, and would estimate 2.4%, 3.2% and 4.0% excess mortality for years 2020, 2021, 2022 for Finland. Whereas Sweden doesn't have an ageing population structure, due to lots of immigration in the past 20 years. And Sweden didn't have an increasing trend in yearly deaths in 2010–2019. This simple method overestimates the excess mortality for many countries, if they have an ageing population structure. Then you end up comparing overestimated values to Sweden's value that it not overestimated.
brutusborn 3y ago
How was Sweden more restrictive than it’s neighbours?
- heyoni 3y ago
  Yea I’m dying to hear this too because that’s what I’ve seen: it was a free for all.
  - RandomLensman 3y ago
    At the very least not practically, a lot of companies went WFH, for example. There might have been less official forcing but behavior for sure changed.
  - stringsandchars 3y ago
    > Yea I’m dying to hear this too because that’s what I’ve seen: it was a free for all. If you go to: https://ourworldindata.org/covid-stringency-index https://ourworldindata.org/covid-stringency-index take away the default countries, and instead add Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden. Then make sure you also click "Align axis scales" you will see that Sweden only had fewer restrictions than its neighbors during a very short period at the beginning of the pandemic (during the first wave). After that, Sweden had both more stringent restrictions than all its neighbors, and had those restrictions in place for a longer period of time. The narrative - the historical revisionism, the myth that a very large number of people want to promote, and which has even become some sort of amnesiac 'reality' for many Swedes - should not be mistaken for what really happened.
    - heyoni 3y ago
      Thanks for the source! And I'm not saying I'm 100% right but I do remember reading articles from the economist and other solid publications about them not having any restrictions. I won't be able to find the article but I will look...and also look at this one. /edit I actually found this in my bookmarks fyi: https://archive.ph/7y7gF https://archive.ph/7y7gF

nvm0n2 3y ago

> the first two devastating waves during the Spring and Autumn of 2020 Sweden had negative excess mortality from Jan 2020 to Spring 2021, so fewer people died than expected in this period. These COVID waves just weren't devastating in any way, and yielded virtually no deaths "of" and not "with" COVID. It's strange that you are so convinced that Sweden's data doesn't disprove the effectiveness of lockdowns... > neo-liberal groups that placed economics above human lives Ah, I see.

sampo 3y ago
> Sweden had negative excess mortality from Jan 2020 to Spring 2021 According to this, Sweden had quite bad excess mortality in 2020 in April and May, and some in June. And then again from mid-November 2020 to mid-January 2021. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-raw-death-count?country=~SWE https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-raw-deat... There are many different ways different sources have tried to estimate cumulative excess mortality. Depending on the calculation methods, different sources have ended up with quite different results. What is your source, and what method did they use?
- nvm0n2 3y ago
  2015-2019 average baseline. It can be debated what model should be used and governments don't always have consistent methods of baselining. With different models you can compute some excess mortality in Sweden but those have their own flaws. But it's worth calling out here that the reason you have to dive into the details of what precise baseline model you use is because the number of deaths was so very tiny on the scale of a country. A simple graph showing the absolute numbers puts it in perspective: https://www.statista.com/statistics/525353/sweden-number-of-deaths/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/525353/sweden-number-of-... Alternatively, a graph of deaths per 100k people shows how surprisingly normal 2020 was in Sweden: https://i0.wp.com/swprs.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/sweden-mortality-stepwise-zorinaq.png?ssl=1 https://i0.wp.com/swprs.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/swede... It looks initially dramatic but that's only due to the massive drop in 2019. In reality 2020 had the same number of deaths per pop as in 2015! Nothing special happened in 2015. Given that 2019 was an abnormally low year, 2020 would have been a bit higher than normal anyway even with no pandemic. But we're still looking at numbers pretty much within the realm of normal variance. If somehow you'd never heard of COVID, then someone had shown you that graph and asked "did something catastrophic happen in this decade" you'd probably have said no. Although 2020 is a bit higher, it's on the order of a few thousands of people, not something you could have noticed in a country of millions short of saturation-level media coverage. That's why it's hard to say but important to hear: these levels of death simply do not matter. How do we know? Because some countries have had high and persistent levels of excess death since the end of the pandemic, but as COVID isn't the explanation hardly anyone cares. There's just no link between levels of death and severity of reaction, in our society.
  - sampo 3y ago
    > 2015-2019 average baseline. Many European countries have an ageing population, and thus the number of yearly deaths increase year to year. For example Finland in 2010–2019 had about 0.8% increase in yearly deaths every year. If the deaths followed this model and thus there was absolutely no excess mortality (and no random variation), the simple method you cite would compare 2020, 2021 and 2022 to the average of 2015–2019, and would estimate 2.4%, 3.2% and 4.0% excess mortality for years 2020, 2021, 2022 for Finland. Whereas Sweden doesn't have an ageing population structure, due to lots of immigration in the past 20 years. And Sweden didn't have an increasing trend in yearly deaths in 2010–2019. This simple method overestimates the excess mortality for many countries, if they have an ageing population structure. Then you end up comparing overestimated values to Sweden's value that it not overestimated.

brutusborn 3y ago

How was Sweden more restrictive than it’s neighbours?

heyoni 3y ago
Yea I’m dying to hear this too because that’s what I’ve seen: it was a free for all.
- RandomLensman 3y ago
  At the very least not practically, a lot of companies went WFH, for example. There might have been less official forcing but behavior for sure changed.
- stringsandchars 3y ago
  > Yea I’m dying to hear this too because that’s what I’ve seen: it was a free for all. If you go to: https://ourworldindata.org/covid-stringency-index https://ourworldindata.org/covid-stringency-index take away the default countries, and instead add Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden. Then make sure you also click "Align axis scales" you will see that Sweden only had fewer restrictions than its neighbors during a very short period at the beginning of the pandemic (during the first wave). After that, Sweden had both more stringent restrictions than all its neighbors, and had those restrictions in place for a longer period of time. The narrative - the historical revisionism, the myth that a very large number of people want to promote, and which has even become some sort of amnesiac 'reality' for many Swedes - should not be mistaken for what really happened.
  - heyoni 3y ago
    Thanks for the source! And I'm not saying I'm 100% right but I do remember reading articles from the economist and other solid publications about them not having any restrictions. I won't be able to find the article but I will look...and also look at this one. /edit I actually found this in my bookmarks fyi: https://archive.ph/7y7gF https://archive.ph/7y7gF